The noise is back in a way I’d forgotten was even possible,” says Jamie Smith, a senior writer at Newcastle United fanzine The Mag. “There’s elation in the air: in the pubs beforehand, on the walk up to the ground, even through the week. The mojo is back on Tyneside.”
It’s quite a shift to take in. As a Toon fan myself, I've become a connoisseur of coping with failure. Few teams have a taste for bathos quite like that of Newcastle United. The real hyperbole-piercing, expectations-shattering kind, where all hope turns into hopelessness faster than you can say Blaydon Races. This is a club that famously squandered a 12-point lead over Manchester United in 1996; hauled themselves into two successive FA Cup finals in 1998 and 1999 only to fire insipid blanks; and egregiously sacked a national treasure – Sir Bobby Robson – who’d got them to fourth, third, and fifth between 2002 and 2004.
